Yes, that cursor animation is just awful. What kind of User Experience Designer thought it was a good idea to take a discrete event - typing a character or using a cursor key - and turn it into a laggy animation? No other application does this. It's simply a ridiculous idea.

Adding insult to injury, Word has a "Provide feedback with animation" checkbox in the Word Options/Ease of Access panel. But turning off this checkbox does nothing! You still get the animations unless you turn off the systemwide animation setting.

Wait, there is another application that does this, and it's even worse: Excel. By default, Excel animates the cell selection border even if you click on another cell far away. Yes, it starts an animation at the cell you were on and animates it all the way to the cell you clicked on. This is incredibly stupid: when I click on a cell, that is the cell my attention is on. I don't care about the cell that was previously selected, or seeing an animation go diagonally or whatever direction from there to the cell I clicked. Why in the world did anyone think this animation was helpful?

Excel also does not respond to the systemwide animation disable, but thankfully it does have the animation checkbox like Word in its own options panel, and that one works.